scrape multiple linked HTML tables in R and rvest

Question

This article http://www.ajnr.org/content/30/7/1402.full contains four links to html-tables which I would like to scrape with rvest.

With help of the css selector:

<

Answer 1

Here's one approach:

library(rvest)

url <- "http://www.ajnr.org/content/30/7/1402.full"
page <- read_html(url)

# First find all the urls
table_urls <- page %>% 
  html_nodes(".table-inline li:nth-child(1) a") %>%
  html_attr("href") %>%
  xml2::url_absolute(url)

# Then loop over the urls, downloading & extracting the table
lapply(table_urls, . %>% read_html() %>% html_table())